1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of data publishing, and particularly to solutions for the preservation of privacy in query verification of outsourced third-party data publishing models.
2. Description of Background
Due to the large amounts of data that is available for publication over the Internet or large scale Intranets and the high frequency of query requests for such data, many data owners may find themselves seeking the services of third-party data publishers. In order to provide better service to their clients, data owners typically provide data for publication to one or more third-party data publishers. Problems with the use of third-party data publishers can arise in the event that the publisher or publishers are not trusted. For example, in some instances a publisher may be malicious, meaning that the publisher has the capability to modify the data and as a result return bogus query results to an unsuspecting client.
In a further example, the data publisher's server could be compromised—resulting in the data publisher losing control of the security of their own server. Typically, the securing of large online data systems has proving to be a daunting task. Therefore, it is most critical for a client to ensure that the query result that is received from a publisher that is not trusted is both authentic and complete. The ability to prove the authenticity and completeness of query results can also be very useful in defeating server spoofing attacks, where attackers try to impersonate legitimate servers with their own data servers and feed the clients with malicious information.
Currently solutions that are implemented to guarantee the authenticity and completeness of the query results may result in unforeseen problems. For example, in some instances in order to guarantee the completeness of a dataset a publisher may inadvertently leak information in regard to data records that are outside of a prescribed query space. This result may conflict with implemented access control policies and a client may obtain information that he or she is not allowed to access—thus the privacy of the data is not preserved within the transaction.